Thursday, January 4, 2024: 4:10 PM
Golden Gate 4 (Hilton Union Square)
Mariana Gómez Villanueva, Mora Institute
At the beginning of the 1970s, a magazine titled María, Liberación del Pueblo began to be published in the city of Cuernavaca. This is one of the few periodical publications designed and created exclusively by the women who participated in the Ecclesial Base Communities (EBC) of Morelos. This source let us to understand the importance that women had in all the progressive Catholic nuclei that developed in Latin America, starting not only because of the Second Vatican Council (1962) but also from the Catholic movements that already existed in the region, as well as the social, economic and political context of the countries that were recognize as the “third world”. In this magazine, the women of the EBC built a complex discourse focused on the Catholic message of liberation, the analysis of political and social events in Mexico and Latin America from a perspective of criticism of capitalism, and, finally, on the material, social and political conditions in which women from popular urban and rural marginalized areas lived.
This paper has the objective of analyze their opinions and discourse around maternity and family prevention methods (contraceptive methods). I propose to examine their ideological position concerning these two issues and how this can be related to a discourse of "opción preferencial de los pobres" and liberation, two fundamental concepts for liberation theologies and progressive Catholicism. I propose to study these women from the perspective of popular feminism to demonstrate that, although a feminist movement did not unfold within the Catholic institution, a feminist consciousness did. Although different from historical or academic feminism, this popular feminism is also relevant since it highlighted the need for intersectionality and the creation of a theoretical corpus that would reach their own experiences and particularities as mujeres de la base.
